Why the First Few Weeks of the Season Feel Different
Dr Harvey Smith | Sport and Exercise Psychologist | Glasgow
Preseason to Season: What Actually Needs to Carry Over?
Ask most players what changes once preseason ends and the season begins, and you'll usually get an answer about fitness. Sharper legs, better conditioning, ready for ninety minutes. True, but only half the picture. The bigger shift is psychological, and it gets almost no attention until it starts causing problems three or four games in.
I noticed it again this summer, watching preseason unfold in both football and the NFL. Different sport, same pattern: coaches rotating squads, low stakes, everyone easing in. Then the real fixtures start, and something in the atmosphere tightens that no amount of rehearsal fully prepares you for. Bobby Knight put it well: "The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win." Preseason builds the will to prepare. The season tests whether that preparation was built on anything stable.
The trap of readiness by rehearsal
Preseason forgives error by design. Friendlies don't count, mistakes are development, not damage. That structure builds fitness and sharpness cleanly. It doesn't automatically build composure under consequence, because the environment that shaped it was never truly comparable to the one about to test it.
What should carry over
The most useful shift is moving the target of a goal. Preseason goals tend to be process-heavy almost by accident: sharpen combinations, build fitness, find rhythm. Once results count, players instinctively let outcome quietly take over as the only measure of a good week. Locke and Latham (2002) showed specific, self-referenced goals sustain motivation and performance under pressure far more reliably than outcome-based ones.
The second shift is treating mental preparation as seriously as physical preparation. A consistent pre-performance routine, rehearsed through preseason and carried unchanged into competitive fixtures, gives a player something stable to return to when the moment stops feeling routine. Cotterill (2010) found these routines genuinely regulate attention and emotion, not superstition dressed up.
The cost nobody tracks
Joseph et al. (2025) tracked elite Australian footballers every day across a full season and found something that runs against instinct. Mental fatigue didn't build gradually as the season wore on. It peaked right at the start, during preseason itself, higher than at any point once the season was underway, and it rose in step with poorer sleep and greater physical tiredness. The mental cost of the transition is front-loaded, not backloaded. It hits hardest before a ball is even kicked competitively.
Most clubs track physical load closely here: GPS distances, session intensity, gym volume. Very few ask players how mentally fatigued they feel on the same day. A simple fix: a daily one-to-ten mental fatigue rating, logged alongside the physical monitoring already in place, so a dip gets caught and addressed with rest before it turns into a slow start to the season.
Readiness isn't the absence of nerves
Being ready doesn't mean feeling calm. Some of the most prepared players I've worked with are visibly nervous before an opener, and that isn't a contradiction. Readiness is a stable relationship with your own process, held steady whether the nerves show up or not.
Whether you're an individual athlete managing your own transition or a team navigating it together, if this resonates with where you're at right now, I'm always happy to have a conversation about what it might look like to work on this.
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This post draws on peer-reviewed research. Key sources are listed below.
Cotterill, S. (2010). Pre-performance routines in sport: Current understanding and future directions. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 3(2), 132–153.
Joseph, S. D., Russell, S., Halson, S. L., Johnston, R. D., Timmins, R. G., Murray, N. B., Griffith, S., & Cormack, S. J. (2025). Changes in mental fatigue across preparation and competition periods in elite male Australian football players. Journal of Sports Science, 43(12), 1175–1184.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.